AR Drone 2 and ffserver + ffmpeg streaming

Question

I want to be able to restream the video feed of the AR Drone 2 from a Debian Server to Flash.

I am aware that the AR Drone uses the codec p264. I'm totally green when it comes to video codecs, so I don't know what will be suitable for the goal I want to achieve?

I have been able to stream the video feed from the AR Drone but with very high latency and extremely low quality, compared to when I directly connect to the AR Drone using ffplay.

I currently use the .swf example in the standard ffserver.conf:

<Stream test.swf>
Feed feed1.ffm
Format swf
VideoFrameRate 30
VideoIntraOnly
NoAudio
</Stream>

And the settings for the .ffm Feed are as follows:

<Feed feed1.ffm>
File /tmp/feed1.ffm
FileMaxSize 17K
ACL allow 127.0.0.1
NoAudio
</Feed>

The command I use for giving input to the ffserver feed:

ffmpeg -i http://192.168.1.1:5555 http://localhost:8090/feed1.ffm

How am I able to achieve lower latency and higher quality, since the stream is currently unwatchable?

Answer 1

Unfortunately ffserver just simply will not get the job you want done. You have hit the same wall as everyone else on the internet. The best I can get is about 3 second delay which gradually increases to about 5-10 seconds as the stream runs for a few hours.

the stream isn't decoding with ffmpeg for me also. I do not know why. it works with ffplay which just confuses me more!

I am looking into Py-Media to see if i can just write my own code for a similar project. I want to stream ardrone video and minipulate the images in the stream.

p.s. look into gstreamer, I saw others discussing it yields different results.